Most indigenous people in the Americas descend from Asian people who crossed a land bridge from Siberia, an estimated 13,000-17,000 years agoPhoto: Gleison Miranda / FUNAI / Survival / www.uncontactedtribes.org

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The tribe was photographed near the Peru - Brazil border

By John Gimlette

7:00AM GMT 02 Feb 2011

New photographs of a hitherto unknown Brazilian tribe have caused great excitement around the world – and not just among anthropologists. The aerial images of indigenous Panoan Indians, their skin painted with red and black vegetable dye and their spears raised in suspicion, will feature in tomorrow’s episode of Human Planet, the BBC’s epic documentary series about man’s place in the natural world. And I, for one, cannot wait to see the footage.

We are endlessly fascinated by those living on the edge of the modern world. It has always been thus: Henry VIII kept a few “savages” at court, and so did the Medicis. But it’s hard to believe that these days an entire society can be truly “lost” for long.

NASA has photographed almost every inch of the world, and the US military, among others, has mapped it out down to the last hillock and bog. What’s more, anthropologists are everywhere, not to mention prospectors, botanists, hunters and bandits. There’s barely a corner of our planet that hasn’t been assessed for its prospects of yielding gold or oil. To remain lost, despite all this, would be quite an achievement for any tribe.

That said, Survival International, which campaigns on behalf of tribal peoples, reckons there are still around 70 lost tribes. By this, they mean ethnic groups that have no sustained contact with mainstream society, rather than no contact at all with humans. Paraguay’s Ayoreo tribe are often described as lost, and yet some tribesmen visit towns; I’ve seen them several times around the Chaco desert. One sub-group, the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode tribe, have never seen a white man. But that doesn’t mean they live in total isolation. They may trade on the river, and so – like the tribe in the recent photographs – will have ‘modern’ implements and ironware.

In this context, it’s often therefore better to think of “lost” as a relative term. A tribe might even be described as lost even though, physically, it lives right on the edge of the modern world. An example from history is the Beothuk tribe of Newfoundland. Although they lived among the settlers, they refused to interact, smashed anything “modern” that they found, and eventually, in the 1820s, became extinct.

A more modern example is the Aché tribe, again in Paraguay. For centuries, they’ve resisted all interaction with the outside world. This is partly because they were cannibals, and – even in the Sixties – they fought with stone axes. In 2000, I managed to catch up with them in the far north of the country. They gave me a beautiful bow and three arrows, made entirely from hardwood and vines. “And the cannibalism?” I asked. “We haven’t eaten anyone for 20 years,” I was told, “although we think about it all the time.”

But it’s not just in South America that tribes exist on the edge of obscurity. Africa, Asia and Australasia all have their fair share of people living at the margins of modern life. Once, when I visited a tribe called the Khutia Kondh in dense teak forests of Orissa, east India, the women starting screaming about ghosts, and fled inside. It took my guide ages to soothe them and allay their fears. They’d tattooed their faces, they told us, to make themselves less attractive to slavers.

But I’ll never forget my first encounter with another Orissian tribe, the Bonda. It’s said they were condemned by the goddess Sita to eternal nakedness, and the women wear nothing but their silver and beads. The men, by contrast, were drab but viciously armed with drawn swords and iron-tipped arrows. “If you photograph them,” warned my guide, “they’ll happily kill you.” The reputation of the Bonda for casual homicide has always intrigued anthropologists. Although entirely indifferent to possessions and devoid of sexual jealousy, they have a capacity for sudden and deadly fury. What they fear most of all is sorcery – and photography is sorcery. They will unflinchingly kill a photographer and won’t deny the crime; to the Bonda, deceit is worse than murder.

I still cherish the tiny sickle the Bonda gave me. It’s a reminder that encounters with tribes need not always be bad. The “lost Brazilians” may be a little less lost in the weeks to come, but I suspect it will take more than discovery to threaten their future.